I don't subscribe to the FOSS purism you often see in Linux projects.
But there's something refreshing about seeing a tool that just gets more useful over time. Contrast that with closed-source software, whose features are driven by OKRs and might vanish if a new PM decides they aren't promotion-worthy or important to the next billion users.
I do wonder about hygiene and vision on such projects. On the one hand, seeing what happens when dozens of people over the decades have all written players for their own weird pet format is cool. On the other, I imagine a lot of that falls out of maintenance if the guy who wrote one looses interest, or if the project gets ported to a platform he doesn't care about.
I also expect that the Linuxisms of "everything is a setting" and "control density over visual appeal" are natural consequences if nobody is in charge of setting a vision.
But there's something refreshing about seeing a tool that just gets more useful over time. Contrast that with closed-source software, whose features are driven by OKRs and might vanish if a new PM decides they aren't promotion-worthy or important to the next billion users.
I do wonder about hygiene and vision on such projects. On the one hand, seeing what happens when dozens of people over the decades have all written players for their own weird pet format is cool. On the other, I imagine a lot of that falls out of maintenance if the guy who wrote one looses interest, or if the project gets ported to a platform he doesn't care about.
I also expect that the Linuxisms of "everything is a setting" and "control density over visual appeal" are natural consequences if nobody is in charge of setting a vision.